The scene was as casual as it was remarkable: 83-year-old Congressman John Dingell of Michigan in his shirtsleeves, his long frame stretched out on a couch as he watched the C-Span feed of the House proceeding.

He slowly sat up, stuck out his hand for a handshake, and smiled in triumph. "This bill isn't everything I might have wished for," he told me. "No piece of legislation is perfect. What we do here is incremental. But I'm happy. And I know my dad would have been, too. He would have said, 'Son, you did all right."

If Obama is the Moses of the new health-care law, Dingell is the Aaron—except that, unlike Aaron, he's happily alive to reach the (incremental) promised land. "There is a certain satisfaction," said Dingell as he kept an eye on the TV.

To paraphrase Solomon, like a dog who returns to his vomit, so a liberal journalist returns to his Obama worship.